Nicely summarised steps. We went through the exact same process to launch our business. Tip: If you want to spend less than a $1000 bucks and launch even faster, start with a service instead of a product. That's pretty much exactly how we launched our business. Took us less than a $100, and grew to $10k/mo relatively fast.
> If you want to spend less than a $1000 bucks and launch even faster, start with a service instead of a product. Took us less than a $100, and grew to $10k/mo relatively fast.
Agreed. SaaS, done right, makes money while you sleep.
Totally. However, when you start as a service, you can quickly get cashflow and use that money to self fund your saas dev. Once your SaaS starts growing you can decrease and maybe at some point kill the service part of the business (or keep it around as a premium upsell). It's the best way I know to bootstrap a business without having to live on ramen.
Time really is a hard constraint. If I could dial back my full time commitment to 30 hours per week I probably would have finished that iOS app side project.
Agreed. With so many different "growth hacking" strategies out there already, the "45 Min/Day" idea would really help to clarify which priorities should come first.
I 've been a wantrepreneur almost a decade now (although the last couple of years I have almost accepted defeat) and what I have realized is that if you can't find the time then probably outsourcing is the best solution.
You are probably right. I must admit that I have actually never outsourced anything. But it seems to me this is the way to go.
Maybe the problem of finding the right people to outsource to, is actually a business idea? Not like the existing sites like odesk (they are called upwork now?) are providing but something like a curated list of people of various disciplines to outsource to?
Might be worth checking out the various issue-bounty setups, like Bountysource. Focus on documenting the design of your MVP in a public Git repo, then file issues with a bounty on them to get tasks done. As soon as you have something working, you can "Show HN" for a blast of dev publicity. If you are looking for small scale funding, without getting into a VC situation, then you could encourage supporters / users to contribute on issues that they personally care about.
This sort of requires you to open-source your project, but maybe you can isolate the secret sauce in one tiny little backend service? Or, maybe the true value of your startup isn't in the source code, but rather in relationships with / between users, in which case you don't really need to worry about someone scooping your work with a simple `git clone`.
Have you successfully followed this plan? It seems to have a couple of holes in it.
I tried #2 at 3 separate jobs over 10 years, to no avail. Best I got was "does it have to be on the books?" i.e. I could call in sick or take random afternoons off and my manager would look the other way. If you are in demand, companies want you to work more, not less.
I was, however, able to negotiate 80% time at my last job, because I made it a condition of my employment before I started working. But that was a hard sell too. In particular they wanted to make sure I was not going to be moonlighting with my extra time. I don't agree with that attitude (my personal projects certainly take a lot of time and energy, even though I'm not making any money with them), but that's how the market works, even for a software engineer.
I also have done this. When companies reach out via recruiters, it never hurts to ask for what you want. Worst case, it's an easy screen; best case, you get what you want..
I have done this as a junior dev to finish my school. I negotiated 6hr days, and I know few people that did something similar to i.e finish theses, e.t.c.
People that go i.e. from intern to full-time often stay at 4h a day, untill they finish school.
On the other hand, I am not sure how well this kind of negotiation will go once I will want to go back to 6 from. 8 h days.
We will see, I definitely plan to do this if we'd have another kid in my family.
Thinking about this more, certain internal HR hiring-budget structure might be what is putting dent in this plan.
In my company, if there is open position, afaik there seem to be two things associated with it, a rack and some budget.
Before I learned this I would often suggest things like "why don't we hire these two students on part time, instead of just one of them full-time", but sometimes it turned out we only have one rack, even if we have enough budget for both of them.
So, that might be why you have to fight so hard for part-time, because the guys hiring you want as much worked-hours as possible for their limited amount of racks?
Still, junior/intern racks seem to be easier to get, so that might be why my company does offer part-times for students. And we have several cs/se university faculties the city, so we would be missing out on really skilled people if we didnt.
Unfortunately I realised that my brain just doesn't work that way. It seems that for any meaningful, productive work I need at least hour and half. On smaller budget I can only do chores, i.e. pay an invoice or answer a trivial email.
As if there was some weird rule stating "if you can't complete a thing in 15 mins, it will take you at least an hour"
For harder work, I need 3 hours and quiet. 4 hours seem to be the most efficient time chunk anyway, and after that it starts sharply falling (usually there is little difference if I work for 6 or 10 hours straight)
I think it's a matter of practice. I experimented with trying to do a long kata (the old Core Wars game) one pomodoro a day [0]. I didn't finish it, but I managed 66 pomodoros. I kept a detailed TODO list and I was really surprised that I could maintain a fairly decent pace. The link has Asciinema videos of every Pomodoro I did. It's painfully slow watching me type, but if you use the ">" key, you can speed up the video (3-4 times seems about right).
At the beginning I had difficulty getting much done, but by the end it only took me about a minute to get into the zone. I think the other main problem I had (which culminated in me not continuing) is maintaining a regular schedule. 1 pomodoro a day doesn't seem that hard to do, but sustaining the pace over the long term was pretty difficult. I ended up skipping lots of days (sometimes going a week between pomodoros) and finally gave up. One of these days I'll learn how to overcome that problem :-)
Hmmm... It's a couple of thousand lines of code I think. I forget. If you go to the link, the code is there (I run everything through Github). Each pomodoro is in it's own branch and I kept them around so that I could study the diffs later (haven't gotten around to it yet).
My original goal was to practice constant refactoring on a non-toy sized problem. Normal katas necessarily require you to work on toy problems. Because of this many interesting real world problems never come up. Frequently you can see people using techniques that aren't sustainable, for instance.
In the end, while I did get some value from that, by far the most interesting thing I discovered was that you can write code 1 pomodoro a day! If you take this as being about 1 weeks worth of work, I think my productivity is a bit lower than normal. However, it's not off by that much.
Even more interestingly, because I work in a timezone 9 hours separated from my colleagues I've always wanted to be able to hand over work. In other words, 2 people working on the same story. 1 person works during the night and the other person works during the day. They hand over the code in the morning and the evening. Using the TODO list techniques I was using in the kata (and making sure to end the day on a failing test), I've actually been able to accomplish this with like minded colleagues. It's actually quite incredible. Probably I should write a blog post about it ;-)
> Even more interestingly, because I work in a timezone 9 hours separated from my colleagues I've always wanted to be able to hand over work. In other words, 2 people working on the same story. 1 person works during the night and the other person works during the day. They hand over the code in the morning and the evening. Using the TODO list techniques I was using in the kata (and making sure to end the day on a failing test), I've actually been able to accomplish this with like minded colleagues. It's actually quite incredible. Probably I should write a blog post about it ;-)
I would definitely be very interested in this. Seems like a smart way to work remote or on personal projects.
OK. I'll do it. I've been resisting re-awakening my blog because I have too many other things to do, but it's probably time. Sometime in the nearish future (give me a week anyway ;-) ), take a look at http://mikekchar.github.io/portfolio//index.html. If you don't notice any changes since 2013, feel free to email me and kick my ass ;-)
Thanks for the link, I would like to try something similar. Probably would take on some project for a new command line util at work that I wanted to create for some time :-)
Having it work related would mean that sheduling would be easier. I would try to do that for first half hour of the day. If that really does improve the 'getting into the zone' so much, that would really be awesome.
The interesting thing being that he didn't do any of the things he says he would do (so, maybe despite all his best undercover efforts, things would fail !), yet people listen as if the messiah was talking.
"We, marketers, are selfish, lying, short-term thinking scum. We believe that our job is to manipulate people as we market to them."
The book Propaganda by Edward Bernays is an excellent read about how to think long-term about marketing. Define your ultimate goals -> dial out several levels and think about what conditions drive people to participate in those goals -> work to create those conditions.
Interesting to think about how to do it in conjunction with "focus on the tiniest audience possible."
Propaganda is the exact opposite of what digital marketing is about.
In fact, the provided quote from the article is supposed to highlight that the "time for propaganda is over" in an ironical way.
Propaganda is the way of the TV, shouting, manipulation, disruption, etc.
Focusing on a defined audience, on the other hand, is the way of the "new" marketing that Godin (an the article) talks about.
Therefore attempting to think about "the tiniest audience" in conjunction with "propaganda" terms is going to be unproductive; because in propaganda, "everybody" is your audience, not a defined segment.
Seems like fluff junk. I've noticed a lot of these indiehackers posts are either a 1000 word post that could be distilled to a few bullet points of common sense or are just extrapolating on survivorship bias.
@countryqt30 - looks like you were shadow banned about 200 days ago - might want to ask a mod why, as I can't see anything bad IMHO - but I didn't look hard.
So I spent a few days mesmerized by Jocko Willink, the ex-marine turned motivational coach until I realized all of these people are saying the same: stop daydreaming and keep doing something until it hurts and then continue some.
This is obviously survivorship bias. Everyone who has gone out and achieved success has started by starting. There is no success story that starts without this initial spark and usually a lot of hard work. But all of these are necessary not sufficient conditions.
This (again) goes down to the nature of skill: even in technical or service roles, etc. much of how we go about our jobs (sufficient conditions) is implicit and nonverbalizable; moreover because that, we can't peel our skills to their "core", to their necessary conditions. We clumsily apply an abundance of skill to get by.
This is compounded in the case of entrepreneurs by the fact that besides not being fully aware of what their magic sauce is, they can't also cleanly decompose what was blind luck and favorable timing from the moxie they brought to the table.
---
Summary for nihilists: every lottery winner starts by going to the store and buying tickets and following the draws and praying a lot and at times cursing at God in the rain at midnight. This is the nature of great achievement.
I think there's a real problem with bootstrapped (as compared to VC funded) business getting any coverage/press recognition and IndieHackers neatly fills that void.
I know a handful of people making $350k+ a year with a bootstrapped business (small SAAS, info products/courses, etc.) but even with that knowledge I'm consistently impressed with the different paths that the people interviewed on IndieHackers have taken.
I don't know you or your background, so there's a decent chance you're already one of these people. But, I do think there is value for many developers and technical people in seeing that you can do something reasonably sized on your own and make significantly more than you might at an office job.
>How do you get the word out about your product or service if you have only $1,000 in the bank? In the words of Seth Godin, "by giving people an abundance of confidence which will create an abundance of value and all I’m asking in return is to be trusted."
The quoted part from Seth Godin sounds like it goes against what the author stands for, as it sounds very salesy.
Exactly this. Same as "build a side project as a marketing channel for your main thing" – as if that side project markets itself. People seem to assume just because something is free, it automatically reaches a big audience.
I started my business with less than $1000. I worked a full-time job and built my first video game product (http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900/The_Cat_Machine/) by waking up earlier in the morning to get an hour or two in before my 'real' job, and working Saturdays, and doing that for a year. I found customers by putting an enormous about of effort into marketing, and finding only some of it paid off (but what did, really worked). Obviously, having a comfortable day job and not having familial responsibilities lowers many of the risks of starting a business, I'm not sure how I would have approached it had I a family or less secure employment.
The biggest expenses were commissioning a composer friend of mine to produce an excellent soundtrack, and licensing a couple of pieces of development software, but that was <$1000. That product has funded my current product, so it's still early days for my business, I'm only a few years into this.
I feel like product one taught me so, so much, and product number two has been a similar learning experience. I'll probably know what I'm doing by my sixth or seventh game!
I know someone who has written two hugo-nominated sci-fi novels, but otherwise lives a typical 9-to-5 work life. I finally asked how he gets his writing done and learned that he wakes up at 5am each day. According to him, "the first thing you do every day is the most important thing".
Oh, I absolutely agree! I'm definitely an early morning sort of person, and when you're a self-employed, self-directed programmer, that feeling in the day of 'getting going', digging into a good chunk of work with free hours stretching ahead of you, that can't really be beaten.
So I do get up earlier, and start work earlier than most, but I don't start the day with news sites, or emails, or twitter or anything like that. At best, it distracts from getting the work-day going, and at worst, it introduces an awful lot of negativity. Took me a while to figure out, perhaps it's more obvious to others, but a truly 'quiet' first few hours in a day is very beneficial to me.
I've also found that my thinking is at its best in the first few hours after I wake up. My creativity and problem solving skills steadily decline throughout the day, and at night I'm only good for fairly mechanical work.
I don't think it's a time of day thing (I'm not an early riser) but more that your brain is refreshed by sleep. I wish I could take naps, it would be wonderful to regain that state mid-day.
I started going to bed earlier so I could wake up earlier. Seems zero sum, but waking up early to focus on my top priority when it is quiet and I am fresh has been a huge gain.
Seth Godin is a marketer and talented self-promoter. His job (which he does well) is to write pithy stuff that captures your attention.
This is an agency problem with a lot of business advice. The people who really know how to launch a business on $1K are almost never the ones writing about how to do it.
This is exactly true. His super skill is self promoting and capturing attention. He has definitely done well at that. And sure it's possible that he could start a business on $1000 but quite honestly I am not sure that is even a good yardstick anyway. A good business could take much more to start and in business you wouldn't never arbitrarily limit yourself in that way anyway.
Not sour grapes either. I started a business years ago with roughly $2000 (let's say it's $6k in today's dollars) that I had saved up. Made money, sold it and it's still operating to this day many years later.
> Seth has published 18 books and is regarded as one the best marketing minds alongside Ogilvy or Tim Ferris, so he doesn't need to be in the trenches anymore.
I hate statements like this ie 'best marketing minds alongside Ogilvy..'.
Who considers Seth equivalent of David Ogilvy or anything close? That's really quite ridiculous actually.
Oh yeah and Tim Ferris is certainly no Ogilvy either.
Ogilvy built a world renown career in advertising. Seth wrote books and started a small company that doesn't even exist anymore. He may have some good things to say but he is certainly not in the league of a David Ogilvy.
Lastly ideas and 'how I'd do it' don't matter as everyone knows. You can have tons of ideas a new idea everyday. Not even trying to implement the idea and just being interviewed about it is like hypothesizing how you'd pick someone up in a bar or win the Olympics.
We publish a few marketing articles a week at Indie Hackers, and that rate will only increase as we attract more authors. I'd suggest either checking in with our site a few times a week or subscribing to our newsletter.
Always wondered why marketing gurus couldn't create any big companies. They write about people psychology, how to sell, how to create hypes and go viral plus they have the network of investors, CEO and brands.
And yet, they're not the people behind behemoths like Stripe, AirBnB, Uber - you name it - nor smaller cool companies out there.
67 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 40.8 ms ] threadI wrote a tiny [1] summary about it on Reddit last week [1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6wz5d5/10kmrr...]
Agreed. SaaS, done right, makes money while you sleep.
"The first 100 hours: systemd-analyze critical-chain" or something to that effect.
Would love to hear more of your suggestions!
I 've been a wantrepreneur almost a decade now (although the last couple of years I have almost accepted defeat) and what I have realized is that if you can't find the time then probably outsourcing is the best solution.
That or start small. Really small.
Maybe the problem of finding the right people to outsource to, is actually a business idea? Not like the existing sites like odesk (they are called upwork now?) are providing but something like a curated list of people of various disciplines to outsource to?
This sort of requires you to open-source your project, but maybe you can isolate the secret sauce in one tiny little backend service? Or, maybe the true value of your startup isn't in the source code, but rather in relationships with / between users, in which case you don't really need to worry about someone scooping your work with a simple `git clone`.
1. Cut your expenses
2. Go to your boss, negotiate working part time
3. Use this time to start your side project
4. Make sure you don't use you company's equipment, make sure you don't work on your project during the time you're supposed to do your regular work.
I tried #2 at 3 separate jobs over 10 years, to no avail. Best I got was "does it have to be on the books?" i.e. I could call in sick or take random afternoons off and my manager would look the other way. If you are in demand, companies want you to work more, not less.
I was, however, able to negotiate 80% time at my last job, because I made it a condition of my employment before I started working. But that was a hard sell too. In particular they wanted to make sure I was not going to be moonlighting with my extra time. I don't agree with that attitude (my personal projects certainly take a lot of time and energy, even though I'm not making any money with them), but that's how the market works, even for a software engineer.
People that go i.e. from intern to full-time often stay at 4h a day, untill they finish school.
On the other hand, I am not sure how well this kind of negotiation will go once I will want to go back to 6 from. 8 h days.
We will see, I definitely plan to do this if we'd have another kid in my family.
In my company, if there is open position, afaik there seem to be two things associated with it, a rack and some budget.
Before I learned this I would often suggest things like "why don't we hire these two students on part time, instead of just one of them full-time", but sometimes it turned out we only have one rack, even if we have enough budget for both of them.
So, that might be why you have to fight so hard for part-time, because the guys hiring you want as much worked-hours as possible for their limited amount of racks?
Still, junior/intern racks seem to be easier to get, so that might be why my company does offer part-times for students. And we have several cs/se university faculties the city, so we would be missing out on really skilled people if we didnt.
As if there was some weird rule stating "if you can't complete a thing in 15 mins, it will take you at least an hour"
For harder work, I need 3 hours and quiet. 4 hours seem to be the most efficient time chunk anyway, and after that it starts sharply falling (usually there is little difference if I work for 6 or 10 hours straight)
At the beginning I had difficulty getting much done, but by the end it only took me about a minute to get into the zone. I think the other main problem I had (which culminated in me not continuing) is maintaining a regular schedule. 1 pomodoro a day doesn't seem that hard to do, but sustaining the pace over the long term was pretty difficult. I ended up skipping lots of days (sometimes going a week between pomodoros) and finally gave up. One of these days I'll learn how to overcome that problem :-)
[0] - http://mikekchar.github.io/core-wars-kata/
My original goal was to practice constant refactoring on a non-toy sized problem. Normal katas necessarily require you to work on toy problems. Because of this many interesting real world problems never come up. Frequently you can see people using techniques that aren't sustainable, for instance.
In the end, while I did get some value from that, by far the most interesting thing I discovered was that you can write code 1 pomodoro a day! If you take this as being about 1 weeks worth of work, I think my productivity is a bit lower than normal. However, it's not off by that much.
Even more interestingly, because I work in a timezone 9 hours separated from my colleagues I've always wanted to be able to hand over work. In other words, 2 people working on the same story. 1 person works during the night and the other person works during the day. They hand over the code in the morning and the evening. Using the TODO list techniques I was using in the kata (and making sure to end the day on a failing test), I've actually been able to accomplish this with like minded colleagues. It's actually quite incredible. Probably I should write a blog post about it ;-)
I would definitely be very interested in this. Seems like a smart way to work remote or on personal projects.
Having it work related would mean that sheduling would be easier. I would try to do that for first half hour of the day. If that really does improve the 'getting into the zone' so much, that would really be awesome.
The book Propaganda by Edward Bernays is an excellent read about how to think long-term about marketing. Define your ultimate goals -> dial out several levels and think about what conditions drive people to participate in those goals -> work to create those conditions.
Interesting to think about how to do it in conjunction with "focus on the tiniest audience possible."
In fact, the provided quote from the article is supposed to highlight that the "time for propaganda is over" in an ironical way.
Propaganda is the way of the TV, shouting, manipulation, disruption, etc.
Focusing on a defined audience, on the other hand, is the way of the "new" marketing that Godin (an the article) talks about.
Therefore attempting to think about "the tiniest audience" in conjunction with "propaganda" terms is going to be unproductive; because in propaganda, "everybody" is your audience, not a defined segment.
Everybody _can_ be your audience. Or a group of 1,000 can be.
2) Yes, this ENTIRE SITE IS 100 % survivor bias - it shares the success stories of startups, nothing else! :)
This is obviously survivorship bias. Everyone who has gone out and achieved success has started by starting. There is no success story that starts without this initial spark and usually a lot of hard work. But all of these are necessary not sufficient conditions.
This (again) goes down to the nature of skill: even in technical or service roles, etc. much of how we go about our jobs (sufficient conditions) is implicit and nonverbalizable; moreover because that, we can't peel our skills to their "core", to their necessary conditions. We clumsily apply an abundance of skill to get by.
This is compounded in the case of entrepreneurs by the fact that besides not being fully aware of what their magic sauce is, they can't also cleanly decompose what was blind luck and favorable timing from the moxie they brought to the table.
--- Summary for nihilists: every lottery winner starts by going to the store and buying tickets and following the draws and praying a lot and at times cursing at God in the rain at midnight. This is the nature of great achievement.
I know a handful of people making $350k+ a year with a bootstrapped business (small SAAS, info products/courses, etc.) but even with that knowledge I'm consistently impressed with the different paths that the people interviewed on IndieHackers have taken.
I don't know you or your background, so there's a decent chance you're already one of these people. But, I do think there is value for many developers and technical people in seeing that you can do something reasonably sized on your own and make significantly more than you might at an office job.
The quoted part from Seth Godin sounds like it goes against what the author stands for, as it sounds very salesy.
So write the medium article and try different ways to get people to read it.
Most people don't know how to do the latter and give up before even starting.
The biggest expenses were commissioning a composer friend of mine to produce an excellent soundtrack, and licensing a couple of pieces of development software, but that was <$1000. That product has funded my current product, so it's still early days for my business, I'm only a few years into this.
I feel like product one taught me so, so much, and product number two has been a similar learning experience. I'll probably know what I'm doing by my sixth or seventh game!
So I do get up earlier, and start work earlier than most, but I don't start the day with news sites, or emails, or twitter or anything like that. At best, it distracts from getting the work-day going, and at worst, it introduces an awful lot of negativity. Took me a while to figure out, perhaps it's more obvious to others, but a truly 'quiet' first few hours in a day is very beneficial to me.
So true - I used to start my day reading news. No more, and my days are happier for it. Most of it is shit you cannot influence anyway.
I don't think it's a time of day thing (I'm not an early riser) but more that your brain is refreshed by sleep. I wish I could take naps, it would be wonderful to regain that state mid-day.
What worked and what didn't?
I've got a side project that I'll hopefully be launching this month and I would love some tips.
This is an agency problem with a lot of business advice. The people who really know how to launch a business on $1K are almost never the ones writing about how to do it.
Not sour grapes either. I started a business years ago with roughly $2000 (let's say it's $6k in today's dollars) that I had saved up. Made money, sold it and it's still operating to this day many years later.
I hate statements like this ie 'best marketing minds alongside Ogilvy..'.
Who considers Seth equivalent of David Ogilvy or anything close? That's really quite ridiculous actually.
Oh yeah and Tim Ferris is certainly no Ogilvy either.
Ogilvy built a world renown career in advertising. Seth wrote books and started a small company that doesn't even exist anymore. He may have some good things to say but he is certainly not in the league of a David Ogilvy.
Lastly ideas and 'how I'd do it' don't matter as everyone knows. You can have tons of ideas a new idea everyday. Not even trying to implement the idea and just being interviewed about it is like hypothesizing how you'd pick someone up in a bar or win the Olympics.
And yet, they're not the people behind behemoths like Stripe, AirBnB, Uber - you name it - nor smaller cool companies out there.